Health Care: A Proposal

The health care in this country is awful.

And for a fussy guy like me who keeps a clean desk and immediately recycles all junk mail, I have very little tolerance for inefficient tomfoolery.

Today, I received in the mail three bottles of medicine I did not need. Medco claims they received two faxes from my allergist for a nasal spray. They sent the first three bottles, which I expected. And then, just eight weeks later, after I did not even finish one bottle, they sent three more. Why? "Because," they told me on the phone, "the doctor faxed us twice. And so we considered this double fax as two prescriptions."
When I told them I had checked online for the status of the first prescription over eight weeks ago to make sure I would not end up on their "automatic refill" list and assumed I was finished with this drug (which I no longer seem to need, thanks to allergy shots), the woman on the phone told me that my checking and making sure had nothing to do with this fact that the doctor had sent in two prescriptions. So this second package of three bottles was not an automatic refill, but a completely new prescription.

Okay, fine, I'm not paying for this. I don't need it. Who do I send the drugs back to?

Of course, they won't take them.

I told them, "You credit my 30 dollars because there is no way I will pay for this."

She told me she couldn't do that. She doesn't have the authority.

Next, I'm all snake necking and I told her, "Give me someone above you who has some authority and stop wasting my time."

So, she did.

Someone called a "conflict resolutionist".

Jesus.

So, I go through the whole load of shit with this next woman. She tells me that if I had read the letter that they sent me, I would have known that they were going to send me this next batch of drugs. I told her I received a letter but the wording was so abstruse, it was impossible to decipher what they were even saying. And, I told her, the Rx number on this letter, which I had right in front of me, did not match any of the Rx numbers listed in my profile online.

She said to me, "Well, when the prescription is filled, the Rx number changes."

So I asked her how the hell anyone would ever know that. And her response was, "Frankly, if I didn't work here, I wouldn't know it."

And it just went on and on. I was supposed to know, apparently, the exact date to check when the Rx number changed. And then what? I would have known what?

When I asked her why her office, upon receiving two replica faxes, would just go ahead and start typing them in. She had no answer for that other than, "We received two prescriptions."

I told her I was looking at my prescriptions online and it wasn't until today that I now see two prescriptions for the same thing, she said, "When you got your letter, you should have looked."

I told her I did look, because I thought the letter was about putting me on the automatic refill list. So, I looked to make sure that I wasn't. And I wasn't. And there was not a second prescription listed. So, at the time of the letter, everything looked just fine."

She had no response to that.

I then asked, "So, the letter you sent to me, which you say alerted me to the fact that there was a second prescription, and I'm looking at the letter right now and the wording is so vague, it could be interpreted as, 'Your vascetomy has just been remotely reversed.' and furthermore, again, the Rx on the letter matched nothing so I just went by what was online and there was one prescription and I did not want it refilled, ever."

Her response: "You should have called us."

"Why? When everything online looked fine?"

Her response: "It changes once we fill the prescription."

"So, why have a phone conversation, a web site and a letter where none of the numbers or stories match?"

Her response: "If you look at this other place on the web, I don't know the name of it, you would have seen there were two prescriptions."

When I told her that when I got the letter I checked online and saw that there was only one prescription, she said, "You have to go to a different screen to see all your prescriptions."

No matter what I said, she had an answer that just confirmed how preposterous Medco is.

The upshot? She had the authority to credit me a maximum of $25. Which she did. And then, she said she would put through a request for a reversal of the remaining $5.

I told her to put a request into the "employee suggestion box" that the Rx #'s remain the same from beginning to middle to end. And also, to maybe check the faxes that come in for duplicates. I also suggested that perhaps the corporate culture there is to crank out drugs willy nilly to maximize profit. She didn't deny my claim.

This is ridiculous. What if you were someone with real health problems?

Here, in our house, we've had two very minor health things this year. A nose and a shoulder. The follow up paperwork has been torture. Almost every single event for both of us has been a complete mistake that required phone calls and arguments. And we have the Cadillac insurance.


I'm done.


So this is my proposal:

The state picks up catastrophic. Forget the Feds, they'll never do it. The rest: Complete free market health care. Everything you have to deal with outside a catastrophe is as simple as shopping around for the cheapest patio furniture. Enough.

This is the one place where I believe a completely free market system will work. And that includes buying your drugs anywhere on the planet.

Enough with this terrible system. It's a huge waste of money and time for everyone.

And both the Left and the Right can agree on this. Free market healthcare. Goodbye middle man. We’ve had enough of you.